Facing the Dead: Recent Research on the Funerary Art of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt

Author(s): Christina Riggs

Source: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 85-101
Published by: Archaeological Institute of America
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Facing the Dead: Recent Research on the Funerary
Art of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
CHRISTINA RIGGS
Abstract
In the 1990s, new scholarship, archaeological discov-
eries, and high-profile museum exhibitions markeda re-
vived interest in the funerary art of Ptolemaic and Ro-
man Egypt. Much of this art is characterized by the use
of naturalistic portraiture, especially in the form of
"mummyportraits"painted on wooden panels, and these
two-dimensionalportrait representations have received
the bulk of scholarly attention. This article examines
recent research on the subject and broadens the field of
inquiry by addressing other forms of funeraryart in use
during the periods in question. It explores two particular
issues, namely the mechanics of portraitureand the con-
tested chronology of the corpus, and suggests further
points for discussion so that the value of art historical
evidence can be better realized in considerations of self-
presentation and cultural identity.*
Throughout the 1990s, Egyptology, classical ar-
chaeology, and related disciplines witnessed a re-
surgence of interest in Hellenistic and Roman
Egypt. Ongoing archaeological work has contribut-
ed to this revival by helping to fill the large gap left
in the record by earlier excavators whose primary
concern lay with Egypt's pharaonic remains. Urban
and mortuary sites, from Alexandria to the western
oases and beyond, have yielded new evidence, while
previously published archaeological remains, mu-
seum objects, and texts have benefited from re-
newed scrutiny. In recent scholarship, a marked,
and mainly profitable, trend has emerged toward
recasting canonical thought on cultural processes
in "melting pot" societies.
As a result of ancient Egypt's pattern of archaeo-
logical preservation and the evident importance of
equipping oneself for death, a pronounced com-
ponent of our material evidence for the Ptolemaic
and Roman periods derives from funerary art-that
*In
preparingthisarticle,I havebenefited immenselyfrom
discussionswithHelen Whitehouse,who alsoprovidedseveral
bibliographicreferences and helpful editorialobservations.
Additionally,I wouldlike to expressmysincerethankstoJohn
Baines and R.R.R.Smith for their valuablecomments on an
earlierdraftof the text.The opinions set forthremainmyown
responsibility.
'Such as Castiglione1961;Grimm1974;Parlasca1966;Par-
lasca 1969-1980; Thompson 1972; Zaloscer 1961. Zaloscer
85
AmericanJournal of Archaeology 106 (2002) 85-101
is, those objects and monuments created expressly
to accompany or commemorate the dead. Within
the last few years, new studies and several high-pro-
file museum exhibitions have taken funerary art as
their focus, picking up the thread of influential
scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s.' An abun-
dance of relevant material, and the fact that much
of it combines Egyptian visual elements with Greek
and Roman (broadly speaking, Hellenic or Greco-
Roman) traits,2 has provided fertile ground for spec-
ulation as to what happens when different cultural
traditions confront each other. The incorporation
of "portraits"-naturalistically painted images of the
deceased individual on shrouds or, most common-
ly, wood panels-not only preserves a rare corpus
of ancient painting but also presents modern, West-
ern viewers with a series of human likenesses which
tempt us to imagine that we can literally and figura-
tively come face to face with the past.
These mummy portraits, as they are known, have
received the bulk of attention in discussions of
Ptolemaic and Roman period funerary art, but they
were by no means the only form of mummy adorn-
ment and mortuary commemoration in use. New
freestanding or rock-cut tombs continued to be
made and were often designed to accommodate
multiple burials in niches or catacombs. Elsewhere,
the hallowed ground of pharaonic cemeteries and
temples was riddled with burial pits and shafts, and
earlier tombs were reused by the busy, well-regulat-
ed mortuary industry.3 Mummification remained
the standard treatment for the dead, but cremation
and non-mummified burials are also attested and
may well be underrepresented in the archaeologi-
cal record, especially if they were the prerogative of
discussedthe development of mummyportraitstudiesin an
article that appeared a few months before her death in De-
cember 1999:Zaloscer1997-1998.
21use "Hellenic"here and throughout this article,rather
than Greco-Roman,to emphasizethe stronglyGreekcharac-
ter of the elite cultureof Egyptin the Hellenisticand Roman
periods.
3For a case
study of the choachyte profession at Thebes
during the Ptolemaicperiod, see Pestman1993.
86 CHRISTINA RIGGS
elites in the major urban centers now lost or inac-
cessible to excavation.4
Funerary art presents a variation across regions
and over, not to mention within, generations. In
the 500 years between the second century B.C. and
the third century A.D., the range of funerary art
produced in Egypt encompassed the following:
1. portrait panels from mummies in the Delta,
the Fayum (fig. 1), and Antinoe;5
2. commemorative shrines of uncertain prove-
nance;6
3. painted shrouds from Hawara in the Fayum,
as well as Saqqara, Antinoe, Asyut (fig. 2), and
Thebes (fig. 3);7
4. decorated tombs in Alexandria, Tuna el-Gebel,
Qau el-Kebir, Akhmim, and the western oa-
ses, including Dakhleh Oasis (fig. 4);8
5. mummy cases of mud-mixture or cartonnage
from Akhmim (fig. 5) ;
6. wooden coffins from Abusir el-Meleq, Middle
Egypt, and Thebes;"'
7. plaster and cartonnage mummy masks from
the Fayum (fig. 6), Middle Egypt, Thebes, and
the western oases, including Bahria Oasis;1
8. stelae from Terenouthis, Dendera, Abydos,
and elsewhere (fig. 7);12
9.tomb sculptures from Tebtunis and Oxyrhyn-
chus. "
The examples in the above list are a sample of
the diverse forms in which the artistic commemora-
tion of the dead was manifested, and although the
array of objects and monuments necessarily reflects
the happenstance of archaeological survival, the
geographic spread of the evidence is considerable.
This "big picture" of mortuary practices in Ptole-
maic and Roman Egypt has been eclipsed, howev-
4Venit(1999, 644) addressesvariationsin the treatmentof
corpses at Alexandria.In his firstseason of excavationat the
Hawaracemeteryin the Fayum,Petrie recorded one crema-
tion burialin a sealed lead urn:Petrie 1889, 11.
' Portrait
findspotsare summarizedby Borg 1996, 183-90;
for portraitmummiesexcavatedat Marinael-Alameinon the
Delta coast, see also Daszewski1997.
` Cairo,
EgyptianMuseumCG 33269, in Seipel 1999, 176-
7 (no. 58); Malibu,J. Paul Getty Museum 74 AP 20-22, in
Walkerand Bierbrier1997a, 123-4 (no. 119).
7Selectionof excavatedexamples:Dublin, NationalMuse-
um of Ireland1911:442(fromHawara),in Parlasca1966,107-
8, 167, 251, pl. 57,1; Cairo,EgyptianMuseumJE9/12/95/1
(Saqqara),in Bresciani1996, 35-59, frontispiece;LouvreAF
6486 (Antinoe), in Aubertand Cortopassi1998, 123 (no. 73);
LouvreE 13382 (Thebes), in Aubertand Cortopassi1998,63
(no. 20).
8Alexandria:Empereur1998a, 154-211; Guimier-Sorbets
and Seif el-Din 1997;Venit 1988, 1997, 1999. Dakhleh Oasis:
Osing 1982, 70-101, pls. 20-34, 36-44; Whitehouse 1998.
[AJA 106
er, by a scholarly output largely centered around
the mummy portraits themselves, thus skewing our
perception of contemporary funerary art and, by
extension, our view of contemporary society.
PORTRAITS OR MASKS?
One self-acknowledged example of the academ-
ic bent for mummy portraits is the volume of pa-
pers that resulted from a colloquium on the funer-
ary art of Roman Egypt, held at the British Museum
in 1995 and published under the title Portraits and
Masks.'4 The volume's contents, like the phrasing
of its title, highlight the rather limited range of
objects that studies have tended to consider. In the
conventional nomenclature used for Roman Egyp-
tian funerary art, the word "portrait" refers to a two-
dimensional, painted image that represents some
specific individual and is "naturalistic" in that the
painting aims to replicate human features much as
they appear to the observer. A "mask" is the stan-
dard Egyptological designation for a three-dimen-
sional, sculpted or molded object made to fit over
the head and chest of a mummy. On the surface,
the two words are no more than easily understood
terms used as academic shorthand in studies of
Roman period funerary art: flat, painted images are
"portraits" and sculpted mummy head-coverings are
"masks."
But set that fact aside for a moment and, for the
sake of argument, consider that in standard English
usage, we frequently say of a portrait that it "reveals"
something about the subject's personality as well as
his or her physical appearance. A mask, on the oth-
er hand, conceals its wearer, hiding the face in fa-
vor of the mask's own features. The juxtaposition of
the words "portraits and masks" thus implies two
Tuna el-Gebel:Gabra1941;Gabraand Drioton 1954.Qau el-
Kebir:Steckewehet al. 1936, 55-64, esp. 57-8 and pls. 21-
22. Akhmim:Kuhlmann1983, 71-81, pls. 33-38.
9Schweitzer1998, esp. her "troisiemeserie,"333; Smith
1997;Walkerand Bierbrier1997a,30-5 (nos. 2-8).
'lMiddle Egypt:Kurth1990.Thebes:Horakand Harrauer
1999,passim;Walkerand Bierbrier1997a,149-50.
" Grimm1974 collects examplesfrom throughoutEgypt.
For newlydiscoveredmaskedmummiesin BahriaOasis,see
Hawass2000.
12Terenouthis: most recently,el-Hafeezet al. 1985. Den-
deraandAbydos:Abdalla1992.Of unknownprovenance,the
stela of Besasillustratedin fig. 7 is Cairo,EgyptianMuseum
CG 27541:Edgar1903, 39-40, pl. 24; Spiegelberg1904, 69-
70, pl. 23.
13Tebtunis:Lutz 1927, 19-20 (nos. 60 and 61), pl. 31.
Oxyrhynchus:von Falck1996;Thomas2000, esp. 59-60, and
figs. 61, 68-74, 79, 117, 118.
14Bierbrier1997.
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT 87

classes of object that are related but mutually ex-

clusive: a mask is not a portrait, a portrait not a mask.
If the terminology we use reflects our assumptions
and affects our interpretations, such word choices
subtly suggest that the painted faces on panels and
shrouds tell us something more about the dead of
Hellenistic and Roman Egypt than do their coun-
terparts among contemporary coffins, mummy
masks, tomb paintings, stelae, and statuary.
The goal of the present article is to question and
help counterbalance this assumption by placing
recent research on funerary art from the Ptolemaic
and Roman periods in a broader perspective. The
body of work produced on this subject in recent
years is sizeable and important. Together, the books
and articles considered here have advanced, but
not exhausted, specialist knowledge of the field,
and they point the way forward for future work.

DISPLAYING THE DEAD

In the summer of 1997, a British Museum exhi-

bition entitled "Ancient Faces" opened to public
acclaim. The culmination of more than two years of
curatorial research and conservation work, "Ancient
Faces" brought together the Museum's extensive
collection of funerary art from Ptolemaic and Ro-
man Egypt, supplemented by loans from other
museums. An eponymous catalogue and the Por-
traits and Masks collection of symposium papers were
published in conjunction with the show to present
the most up-to-date information available on the
objects displayed.'5 Over the next two years, several
more exhibitions focused on Roman Egypt, and on
mummy portraits and other funerary art in particu-
lar. In Marseille, "Egypte Romaine" was on view in
1997, with a section devoted to "les hommes et la
mort."'6 The Louvre inaugurated a gallery of Ro-
man Egyptian funerary art with the special exhibi-
Fig. 1. Mummy portrait of a soldier, early third century A.D.
tion "Portraits de l'Egypte romaine."17 A small 1997 Oxford, Ashmolean Museum E.3755. (Courtesy of the
show in Leiden-"Sensaos: Eye to Eye with the Girl AshmoleanMuseum,Oxford)
in the Mummy"-spotlighted the burial assemblage
of an adolescent girl who died at Thebes in A.D. by the emperor Hadrian and the findspot of both
109; her father Soter was the head of a prominent panel and shroud portraits as well as plaster mum-
local family known from numerous coffins, shrouds, my masks.'9 In 1999, several panel portraits and oth-
mummies, grave goods, and papyri.18 Florence host- er material from the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, trav-
ed a 1998 exhibition commemorating the centena- eled to Vienna and joined the Kunsthistorisches
ry of excavations at Antinoe, a polis founded in Egypt Museum's own collection for the exhibit "Bilder

'5Walkerand Bierbrier1997a;Bierbrier1997.The exhibi- '7Aubert and Cortopassi 1998.

tion's second venue in Rome wasaccompaniedby an Italian
catalogue (Walkerand Bierbrier1997b). Fora critiqueof the
Englishedition from an Egyptologicalviewpoint,see Teeter
1999.
'6Musees de Marseille 1997, 140-71, with an essay by F.
Dunand.
18No exhibition catalogue, but see the museum's Web site,
http://www.rmo.nl/engels/sensaos.html. The Soter family:Van
Landuyt 1995.
9Del Francia Barocas 1998, with a section
(45-8) by R.
Cortopassi on Antinoe's funerary portraits.
88 CHRISTINA RIGGS
~~. ~~#s~~~4.~~~the
Fig. 2. Shroud of a woman named Tasherytwedjahor,from
Asyut,probablyfirst centuryA.D. Boston, Museum of Fine
Arts54.993. (Courtesyof the Museumof Fine Arts,Boston)
[AJA 106
aus dem Wustensand," while Linz and Klagenfurt
hosted "Mumie-Schau'n," based around a coffin
and mummy assemblage normally housed in the
latter city.2"'An ambitious exhibition entitled "Au-
genblicke," held in Frankfurt in 1999, had the add-
ed distinction of being organized by Klaus Parlas-
ca, whose scholarship on Roman Egyptian funerary
art has laid the groundwork for the subject.2 Be-
tween 1999 and 2001, the traveling exhibition "Keiz-
ers an de Nijl/Les Empereurs du Nil" brought
Roman Egypt to audiences in Belgium, France, and
Netherlands.22 And in the spring of 2000, the
circle begun by the original British Museum exhi-
bition was completed when the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art hosted a second "Ancient Faces" exhi-
bition, coordinated, like the original show, by Sus-
an Walker and incorporating additional objects
drawn from the collection of the Metropolitan Mu-
seum and other American and European institu-
tions.23
The appeal of these exhibitions echoes the rap-
turous response that mummy portraits first received
in the late 19th century, when the archaeological
finds of Flinders Petrie packed London's Piccadil-
ly Hall, and the collection of Theodor Graf awed
Viennese art circles.24 Now as then, the naturalistic
portraits on panels and shrouds, generally removed
from their associated mummies, form the core of
the exhibitions and appeal to Western aesthetic
sensibilities, which value any perceived illusionism
in art and expect a portrait to capture the subject's
personality as well as his or her physical appear-
ance. The ultimate expression of this concern with
evaluating "lifelikeness" is the digital or actual re-
construction of mummies' faces-a fascinating ex-
ercise in its own right, for the sake of archaeologi-
cal knowledge, but in specific instances,2' the prac-
tice invites comparisons between the pictorial im-
age and the mortal remains that may be unwarrant-
ed. For example, superimposing a three-dimen-
sional "recreation" of the portrait panel from the
mummy of Artemidorus onto a computer recon-
struction of his face (derived from a CAT scan) ef-
fectively tries to test the accuracy of the portrait and
the ability of the ancient artist; ironically, it also sec-
ond-guesses the very lifelikeness that modern ob-
20Seipel 1999;Horakand Harrauer1999.
2 Parlascaand Seemann 1999.
22Willemsand Clarysse1999;Willemsand Clarysse2000.
23Walker2000.
24SeeMontserrat(1998, 172-80) for an intriguingconsid-
erationof responsesto Petrie'sexhibitionand to the publica-
tion of Graf'scollection.
25E.g., Filer 1997; Raven 1998.
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT
Fig. 3. Shroud of a boy named Nespawtytawy,from Thebes,
second centuryA.D. Oxford,AshmoleanMuseum1913.924.
(Courtesyof the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
servers, like their ancient counterparts, hope to see
in paintings of this genre.26 In a similar vein, much
of the popular-press or museological emphasis on
portraits' realism risks a facile line of questioning
26Themummyof Artemidorusis London, BritishMuseum
EA 21810, in Walkerand Bierbrier1997a,56-7 (no. 32); the
computerizedcombinationof portraitandfacialreconstruction
isunpublished.
89
Fig. 4. Portraitof a man named Petosiris, from his tomb at
Qarat el-Muzzawaqa, Dakhleh Oasis, first century A.D.
(Photo by H. Whitehouse)
(what did the deceased really look like?) and feeds
an assumption that the modern viewer can, and
should, have such an intimate, immediate knowl-
edge of the ancient dead. In an article tellingly
headlined "Expressions so Ancient, yet Familiar,"
The New York7imes's reviewer likened viewing the
Metropolitan Museum "Ancient Faces" show to at-
tending a party among friends and saw emotions of
"despair, bafflement, anger" in the mummy por-
traits themselves.27 Although it is rewarding when
curatorial efforts receive a positive response from
the public, it is nonetheless the case that feeling
empathy for long-dead individuals says more about
ourselves than it does about the ancient society or
individual in question.
Criticisms aside, the recent exhibitions have been
invaluable in bringing the material culture of Hel-
lenistic and Roman Egypt to the wider attention of
"7Cotter 2000; this article and two color photographs of
portraitpanelsfeaturedon the front page of the newspaper's
"Weekend"section.
90 CHRISTINA RIGGS
Fig. 5. Coffin for a man, from Akhmim, first century B.C. London, British Museum EA 29584.
(Courtesyof the Trusteesof the British Museum)
the public and scholars alike, and encouraging
thoughtful interaction with many objects not stud-
ied or displayed before. In many of the shows, cura-
tors have been able to bring together objects from
the same archaeological site which are now scat-
tered among several museums. Well-illustrated ex-
hibition catalogues combine introductory essays
with descriptive entries to reflect some of the most
up-to-date information available on the objects. At
the same time, however, the catalogue format treats
a two-dimensional work more easily than any sculpt-
ed or three-dimensional piece, and in its presenta-
tion of the subject, an exhibition catalogue must
strike a compromise between appealing to a lay
audience and suiting its academic intent.28 The
spate of museum shows and catalogues, with their
necessarily high profile and much-warranted pub-
licity, also has somewhat overshadowed the recep-
tion of other publications in wider academic cir-
cles, to the detriment of recent specialized studies
and archaeological reports. Over the past decade,
28Forinstance,in Walkerand Bierbrier1997a,four coffins,
a shroud,a mummy,andfunerarygoodsbelongingto the Soter
familyaretreatedon twopages(149-50),withtwophotographs.
Furthermore,the necessitiesof marketingan exhibit and its
catalogue perhaps unconsciouslyinfluenced publishers'or
curators'selection of coverillustrations,which favormummy
portraitsof girls and women: Walkerand Bierbrier 1997a;
Walker2000;Aubertand Cortopassi1998;Parlascaand See-
mann 1999;Seipel 1999.
29 Kurth1990;Guimier-Sorbets and Seif el-Din 1997;Venit
1988, 1997.
[AJA 106
numerous articles and monographs have furthered
the study of Ptolemaic and Roman funerary art.
Some of these undertake an in-depth analysis of
one object or monument, such as Kurth's study of a
coffin from Middle Egypt or the analysis of individ-
ual tombs in Alexandria.29 Others identify a cohe-
sive group of objects-Corcoran explores Egyptian
religion and iconography by cataloguing intact por-
trait mummies in Egyptian museums, while Abdal-
la focuses on stelae from Upper Egypt.30
Surveys of religious practices and editions of con-
temporary funerary texts are vital complements to
any consideration of the visual evidence, as are de-
mographic and social analyses.31 New archaeologi-
cal research presents the mortuary record with the
benefit of modern recording standards and scien-
tific techniques, and the thorough excavation of a
necropolis like that recently discovered in Bahria
Oasis will continue to add to and alter many of our
perceptions.32 There, the masked mummies in
rock-cut niches, accompanied by small grave goods,
30Corcoran1995;Abdalla1992.As a reviewerhas pointed
out, the exact criteriaforAbdalla'sselection are not clear:De
Meulenaere 1994.
31
Religiouspractices:Frankfurter1998;Kakosy1995.Mor-
tuarypractices:R6mer 2000;Scheidel 1998;Dunand and Li-
chtenberg 1995;Dunand and Lichtenberg1998,97-124 (ch.
6). Funerarytexts:e.g., Smith 1993. Demographyand social
contexts:Bagnalland Frier1994;Montserrat1996.
32Reportsof recent excavationsinclude Dunandet al. 1992
and the Etudesalexandrines series inauguratedby Empereur
(1998b). On the BahriaOasisdiscovery,see Hawass2000.
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT 91

apparently preserve an extensive mortuary setting
the more rare for having been undisturbed. Reex-
amination of earlier excavation records can also
yield fresh information about the context in which
funerary art was employed.33 Yet the art itself is not
merely an adjunct to textual or archaeological evi-
dence. It offers a unique means of approaching
the inhabitants of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and
evaluating their society's norms and values. This
premise underpins the most effective scholarship
in this area and forms the basis for the following
discussion.
PORTRAITURE
This section and the next consider two recur-
ring issues addressed in recent scholarship: first,
the "lifelike" naturalism of the mummy portraits;
and second, the dating of mummy portraits and
other funerary material.
Much heated debate has centered around wheth-
er the artists of the mummy portraits painted from
personal, first-hand observation of their subjects.
Borg and Parlasca devote sections of their books to
this question, and a prominent review of the Lon-
don "Ancient Faces" exhibition in The New YorkRe-
view of Books criticized the show's curators for sug-
gesting that the portraits were painted some other
way, even perhaps from the dead body.34 A newspa-
per review of the New York "Ancient Faces" took an
opposing view, asserting that the portraits must have
been painted from the body seen "just before or
after a death" and could not have been studio prod-
ucts.35 Regardless, the concept of a portrait atelier
and of sitting for an artist to have one's portrait paint-
ed is a Western, relatively modern one. Painting or
sculpting from a live model continues to be valued
even, or especially, in our photo-dependent era, to
the extent that submission guidelines for the an-
nual BP Portrait Award at London's National Por-
trait Gallery specify that "the entry must be a paint-
ing from life."36 In actuality, being painted,
sketched, or sculpted during a face-to-face interac-
tion between subject and artist is not essential to an
image being called or considered a portrait.
There is little concrete evidence for exactly how
ancient artists captured an individual's image or
whether personal observation of the subject was
considered indispensable. Textual sources inform
us that lifelikeness was highly valued-Pliny notes
that "realistic portraiture indeed has for many gen-
erations been the highest ambition of art"-but
realism and resemblance are subjective, socially
constructed notions.37 Further, artistic naturalism
is still in service to the physical ideals-of beauty,
or wisdom, or youthfulness-embraced by a given
culture. The fact that so many ancient commenta-
tors on art praised realism and lifelikeness does
not tell us exactly what they had in mind, or wheth-
er we, from a 21st-century vantage point, would
agree with their judgments if presented with the

33
E.g., Montserratand Meskell1997;Riggs 2000.
34Borg 1996, 191-5, esp. 193;Parlasca1966, 59, 73-5; Fen-
ton 1997.
35
Cotter 2000, for TheNewYorkTimes.Although the com-
parisonis not explicitlymade, observerslike Cottermayhave
in mind 17th-centurydeathbedportraitslike Van Dyck's"Ve-
netia, LadyDigbyon her Deathbed,"now in the DulwichPic-
tureGallery,London.Forthisportraitand the genre,see Sum-
ner 1995.
36Informationtakenfrom the brochurefor the BPPortrait
Award2000, rule 5.
37NaturalHistory35.52: "Hicmultis iam saeculis summus
animusin pictura,"in reference to portraitsof gladiators;see
discussionin Isager1991, 136-40. Gombrich(1996) explores
issuesof artisticrealismat some length and cites the example
(1996,86) of a lion "drawnfromlife"byVillardde Honnecourt, Fig. 6. Mummymask of a woman named Aphrodite, from
although the resultingimage hardlyfits our idea of how an Hawara,mid firstcenturyA.D. London, BritishMuseumEA
accurateportrayalshould look. In addition,see Bryson(1983, 69020. (Courtesyof the Victoriaand Albert Museum,V&A
esp. 13-5, 53-5) concerning the culturalrelativityof realism. PictureLibrary)
92 CHRISTINA RIGGS
Fig. 7. Stelaof a man named Besas,inscribedin hieroglyphs,
Demotic, and Greek, first century A.D. Cairo, Egyptian
Museum CG 27541. (Edgar 1903, pl. 34)
same images they considered. Because post-Renais-
sance Western art has embraced classical art's ap-
preciation of portraiture and of realism (two sepa-
rate concepts, after all), it is understandably diffi-
cult to keep in mind that the production methods
for, and ultimate goals of, ancient portraiture need
not have been identical to our own. Methodologi-
cal soundness, however, requires such potential
differences between "us" and "them" to be acknowl-
edged and explored.
Official portraits required ease of identification
and the replication of certain very specific features,
and although careful study of imperial images re-
veals much about how they were created and dis-
seminated, it is less clear what procedures applied
in portraiture outside the most elite circles.38 Cer-
tainly artists could and did paint from life, as dem-
onstrated by another passage from Pliny (NH
35.147-8) in which the Hellenistic painter Iaia of
Kyzikos is said to have painted a portrait of herself
by using a mirror, presumably to consult her reflect-
ed image. Other textual and visual sources for
painters are silent on the artist/subject relation-
3sUseful discussion of
imperial portraiture:Smith 1996.
Nowicka (1993,154) observes the poor papyrological documen-
tation for artistic production methods.
39Romanperiod sarcophagusfrom Kerchon the Crimean
peninsula,now in The Hermitage,St. Petersburg;published
most recentlybyM.Nowickain Blanc 1998,66-70 (no. 32). It
seemsunlikelythatthe centrallypositionedsceneof the painter
is meant to be seen in direct spatialrelationshipto the con-
[AJA 106
ship: the painter seated at an easel in a sarcopha-
gus scene displays finished portraits on the wall
behind him but no model is explicitly in evidence.39
In a papyrus of the second century A.D., a sailor
named Apion writes from Misenum to his father at
home in Philadelphia, in the Fayum, to say that he
has sent a small portrait (eiKOViV) of himself back
to the family.40 Although his gesture suggests that
Apion had the financial wherewithal to purchase
this item and that he personally approved of an
image that would, in effect, replace him during his
absence with the imperial navy, his letter gives no
indication of how he obtained the portrait or what
it looked like, nor does the word EiK6viv imply a
specific medium, such as painting.
It is telling that the debate over painting from
life and the mummy portraits has arisen from the
best quality shroud and panel portraits with their
dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked immediacy. Mummy masks,
tomb paintings, stelae, and sculpture have not in-
spired similar inquiries-to put the matter in sim-
plistic terms, does anyone imagine that Petosiris
(fig. 4) posed while the wall of his tomb was paint-
ed or that Besas (fig. 7) spent a long afternoon while
the sculptor chiseled away?41But each of these is a
portrait image and is more naturalistic than not. It
is the painting medium, so similar to our Western
painted portraits and so attuned to our photoreal-
istic mindset, that can easily lead modern observ-
ers to respond to them with a particular immediacy,
inviting artificial distinctions. Painted portraiture
in "naturalistic" mode--the word is used here to
describe an image that attempts to copy what a giv-
en person or object "looks like" to the artist and
viewer-is not a universal or inevitable pictorial
development. If, as Norman Bryson has argued for
classical Western painting, naturalism attempts to
persuade the viewer that the subject of the paint-
ing is the same as the painted image itself, then
this denial of painting's role as a sign imparts addi-
tional potency to portraiture and other representa-
tions of the human form: "[p] robably the most strik-
ing aspect of the encaustic portraiture of antiquity
is the credibility it lends to the idea of the body's
endurance as persistent substrate to all cultural
enterprise: the work of culture seems only a matter
of costume and parure superadded to the recur-
tent of the scenes on either side of it.
40BGU423; see Hunt and Edgar 1932, 304-7 (no. 112).
CitedbyNowicka(1979,24), withfurtherreferencesin her n.
30. The wordin the papyrushas been restoredon the basisof
[... ]KOvtv,so both the reading and the meaning remain hy-
pothetical.
41Petosiris:
supra,n. 8, DakhlehOasis;Besas:supra,n. 12,of
unknownprovenance.
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT
rent genetic pattern." In Bryson's text, two mummy
portrait panels illustrate this point.42
Any ancient portrait will have conformed to ide-
als that were current at the time it was produced
and that contributed to, or controlled, how the im-
age would be read by its audience. In part because
of these shared ideals, contemporaneous portraits
give an impression of sameness when seen along-
side each other, and workshops might well have
maintained a stock of sculpture or paintings that
artists could adjust for salient physical features and
costume details as required.43 Viewing similarly
dated and provenanced panel portraits together,
for instance, one is hard pressed to say whether
three or more portraits do not show just one per-
son-which neither diminishes their artistic and
"portrait" quality nor detracts from their ability to
inform us about the subjects and their world.44 The
degree of verisimilitude, or the "likeness" of image
and subject, does not define a portrait. Instead, it is
the intentional representation of an individual that
sets portraiture apart from other depictions of hu-
man physiognomy and form.45 Furthermore, even
if the ancient actors assigned special prestige to a
perceived mimetic verism in the panel and shroud
portraits, it does not necessarily follow that these
particular objects had a higher material or social
value than other types of funerary art or other types
of portraits, such as busts and statues.
Ancient artists undoubtedly did rely on the phys-
ical presence of their subjects at some stage in the
creation of many portraits, in whatever medium, but
human images serving a portrait function could be
created by other means as well, employing sche-
matic "types," for instance, or imaginative recon-
struction, as the posthumous portrayal of a histori-
cal or semi-legendary figure like Homer would have
required. The portrait genre itself does not neces-
sitate the artist-subject relationship to which we are
accustomed.46 Thus the question with which this
section began, whether mummy portraits were
painted from life, does not lend itself to a "yes" or
4 Bryson1983, 167.The twoportraitshe illustrates(figs.34
and 35) are NationalGallery3932 and 3931, respectively,for
whichsee Walkerand Bierbrier1997a,94-5 (no. 85) and 86-
7 (no. 76).
43Asuggestionalso made by Nowicka1993, 154.
44Cf. the portraitsillustratedin Doxiadis 1995, 56-9.
45Intentionalityunderscores
manydefinitionsof portraiture,
e.g., Campbell1996,274;Brilliant1991,38,127;Nowicka1993,
9-13.
46Variationsin Western
portraitpainting are discussedby
Campbell(1996).
47For instance,a female
mummymaskin the BritishMuse-
um, EA 29476, has been dated to the second half of the sec-
ond centuryA.D., in Parlascaand Seemann 1999, 315 (no.
93
"no" answer and is somewhat of a manufactured
debate, skirting around other issues pertinent to
the production and use of portraits in the Helle-
nistic and Roman worlds.
CHRONOLOGY
Establishing a chronology for Ptolemaic and Ro-
man period funerary art has been a foremost con-
cern of scholars in the field, but the wide range of
dates assigned to individual objects is a sign of con-
tinuing disagreement on the issue and of reliance
on formal or stylistic criteria inadequate to the
task.47 Dating an object is valuable insofar as it al-
lows us to see diachronic developments or synchro-
nic trends, especially when the work in question is
of known provenance or has other contextual in-
formation. Fortunately, much of the corpus of fu-
nerary art displays reliable indicators of date, such
as the Roman hairstyles decisively analyzed by Borg,
or permits a range of dates to be narrowed by com-
parative study of the material.48 Likewise, paleogra-
phy and the content of object inscriptions can sug-
gest or refine a date, sometimes requiring a rein-
terpretation of the pieces in question, as with the
earlier dating recently established for a series of
anthropoid coffins from Akhmim. These coffins, of
which some 40 examples survive for both adults
and children, were modeled in a mud and straw
mixture, which was then given a surface treatment
including paint, gilding, and textile or plaster ad-
ditions. Plundered around the turn of the last cen-
tury, the coffins are devoid of precise archaeologi-
cal context, but their Demotic inscriptions contain
Egyptian recitations for the dead and point to a
date in the first century B.C.49 The Akhmim coffin
group highlights a persistent tendency to adopt a
low chronology for funerary and other material,
based in part on the fallacy that anything that looks
"unusual" or has a naturalistic appearance must
date to the Roman period.50
Another case for redating is the shroud of a wom-
an named Tasherytwedjahor (fig. 2), preserved in
208), and toA.D. 100-120,in WalkerandBierbrier1997a,136-
8 (no. 208). Also in Parlascaand Seemann 1999, two male
mummymasksof identicalmanufacturearearbitrarily separat-
ed by a handful of years,with one mask dated to the begin-
ning of the firstcenturyand the second maskto around the
birth of Christ,presumablyjusta bit earlierthan its counter-
part;no explanationfor this is given:Parlascaand Seemann
1999, 306-7 (nos. 202 and 203).
48Borg1996,plus her contributionin Doxiadis1995, 229-
35.
49Smith 1997.
5) Terracotta
figurinesare among the objectswhose tradi-
tionaldateshavebeen shiftedearlierin light of new evidence:
T6r6k 1995, 22, with furtherreferences.
94 CHRISTINA RIGGS
three fragments. The shroud represents the arms,
shoulders, and head of the deceased in the formal
language of Hellenic art, while the fields below
contain Egyptian scenes. Two Demotic inscriptions
name the deceased and her husband (or father-
the reading is debated), who was a priest of Wep-
wawet at Asyut; the date of her burial is given as the
fourth (?) regnal year of an unspecified ruler. Based
on this date and a perceived similarity between the
woman's hairstyle and those of Severan empresses,
publications of the shroud have placed it in the
reign of Septimius Severus, and specifically at A.D.
195/6.5' However, the Demotic handwriting of the
inscriptions, each by a different scribe, bears ortho-
graphic and paleographic similarities to texts of
the late Ptolemaic period or the first century A.D.52
Since the hairstyle worn by Tasherytwedjahor re-
veals her earlobes and narrows at the nape of her
neck, without indicating any gathering or folding
of the hair into the Scheitelzopf typical of Severan
styles, it also does not support a Severan date. The
hairstyle may simply be a variation of the neatly
dressed "melon" coiffure, or it may not be explicit-
ly based on a Roman imperial model. Tasherytwed-
jahor's earrings are a fashion already attested in the
early first century A.D.,"3 and the position of her
arms and hands parallels a first-century A.D. shroud
portrait from Hawara.54
Naturalistic portraiture in the Hellenic manner
was not an innovation under Roman rule but a de-
velopment that had, unsurprisingly, earlier roots.
What the beginning of Roman rule did introduce
to the Egyptian artistic milieu was the authoritative
and highly crafted imperial image, the influence
of which had almost immediate repercussions in
private portraiture throughout Roman territory.55
The effectiveness of the Augustan artistic program
and the portrait commemoration of the Julio-Clau-
51D'Auriaet al. 1988, 240-1 (no. 154); Parlascaand See-
mann 1999, 228 (no. 137); Parlasca2000, 178, fig. 7. Initial
discussionof the date of the shroud:Parlasca1966, 186-7. In
Demotic script,some numbers closely resemble each other,
leading to uncertaintyin the specific readings.
52 am indebted to MarkSmithfor
discussingthispointwith
me andsuggestingpossiblepaleographiccomparisons,to Mark
Depauwfor an additionalopinion on the paleography,and to
MartinAndreasStadlerforfurtherinformationon the shroud
inscriptions.
53Comparea portraitpanel inscribedin Demoticfor Eirene
(Stuttgart,WurtembergischesLandesmuseuminv.7.2): Borg
1996,30 (Julio-Claudian)pl. 1,2;Walkerand Bierbrier1997a,
115-6 (no. 111), as Trajanic.
54Walker and Bierbrier1997a,41-2 (no. 15);Walker2000,
38-9 (no. 1). The presentmounting of the Tasherytwedjahor
shroudfragmentsin fig. 3 leavesno room for the folded floral
wreaththat should be expected in the subject'sright hand.
[AJA 106
dian dynasty no doubt contributed to the use of
Roman hairstyles in funerary art in Egypt, where
they appear as early as the reign of Tiberius.56 Fash-
ionable hairstyles continued to distinguish much
of the Egyptian corpus for as long as naturalistic
portraiture was used in conjunction with the pre-
served corpse. The most up-to-date research on
hairstyles in Roman sculpture informs Borg's
Mumienportrdts,an authoritative study that employs
valid comparanda to restructure the chronology of
the panel portraits. Borg places the latest exam-
ples in the mid third century, convincingly reas-
signing to the second century A.D. several portraits
previously held to be of fourth century date.57 Fu-
nerary art later than the Severan period-some
shrouds from Antinoe, for instance, and the tomb
sculptures from Oxyrhynchus-employs minimal,
if any, Egyptian iconography and often is not specif-
ically associated with the mummification of the
dead.58 The economic, political, and social alter-
ations of the third century A.D. transformed the
actualization of native religious practices and mor-
tuary customs, and those segments of the popula-
tion that had maintained the Egyptian funerary tra-
dition, and the visual codes it required of art, like-
wise will have adapted to the changing times.59
Borg identifies no portrait panels as dating later
than the mid third century A.D., a downward revi-
sion of the chronology developed by Parlasca.6"
Within the narrow field of Roman Egyptian funer-
ary art, the ramifications of this chronological de-
bate have been strongly felt.61 Parlasca disagrees
with the new dates proposed by Borg and others
and cites one panel that, judging by the promi-
nence of the female subject's Scheitelzopfhair roll,
should date to the late third or early fourth centu-
ry.62His strongly worded review of Borg's 1996 mono-
graph is largely devoted to the late chronology of
55Zanker 1989, esp. 102-3.
56E.g.,Hannover,KestnerMuseum1966.89:Borg 1996,29-
30, pl. 1, 1. For the pictorialpropagandaof Augustusand his
successors,see Zanker1988.
57Borg1996, 22-6.
58Fourth-centuryA.D. shroudsfromAntinoe:Parlascaand
Seemann, 74-8, esp. n. 15; Walker2000,147-8 (no. 99). A
late third- or early fourth-centuryfunerarysculpture from
Oxyrhynchus:Schneider 1992, 88-9 (no. 37).
5 Cf.
Borg 1996, 204-8; Frankfurter1998,passim.
"0Borg 1996, 80-4, in contrastto Parlasca1969-1980, esp.
his vol. 3 (1980); cf. the reviewof all three publishedvolumes
byJucker1984.
61 SusanWalker
neatlysummarizesthe debate, its origins,
and its effectsin "Anote on the dating of mummyportraits,"
Walker2000, 34-6.
32Parlascaand Seemann 1999,36; Parlasca2000,
181-2, in
reference to Morlanwelz,Mus6eRoyalde Mariemont78/10,
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT
the mummy portraits.63 The weight of the evidence,
however, supports the reasonable conclusion that
adorning mummies with portraits, masks, and
shrouds became increasingly less common during
the course of the third century. Other chronologi-
cal disagreements exist as well: Parlasca rejects the
redating of the Akhmim coffin group to the first
century B.C. (or early first century A.D., conserva-
tively) by reverting instead to a second-century A.D.
date for a female coffin included in the Augenblicke
exhibition."4 The nonspecialist might be left with
the impression that assigning dates to art, and es-
pecially funerary art, from Ptolemaic and Roman
Egypt is an uncertain business, but the uncertainty
generally arises from attempts to date material us-
ing ill-defined criteria of quality or style. Subjective
judgments still abound, including assumptions that
something of "lesser" quality must be earlier, or lat-
er, than a "better" example.65 Only reliable meth-
ods, such as textual and paleographic evidence,
appropriate comparisons with Roman fashions and
portraiture, and similarities in manufacture and
decoration observed within a "workshop" corpus,
permit reliable conclusions and show the way for-
ward for future refinements to the chronology.
REPRESENTING THE DEAD
As the above remarks have shown, mummy por-
traits on panels were one of several options for rep-
resenting the dead in the Egyptian mortuary tradi-
tion as practiced in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.
Naturalistic portraiture like that of the panels also
appeared in tomb paintings and in sculpted form,
on masks, coffins, stelae, and statuary. Many other
shrouds, coffins, and masks do not depict the de-
ceased in a "lifelike" manner at all but in an ideal-
ized form marking the deceased's close association
with an Egyptian deity, or simply as a participant in
scenes of the Egyptian afterlife. Naturalistic por-
traiture did not replace or take precedence over
more traditional, idealized representations. At
Hawara, Petrie excavated one of the most extensive
forwhichsee Parlasca2000,fig. 8;Parlascaand Seemann 1999,
238 (no. 146), with furtherbibliographyand a discussionof
the panel'sdate.Accordingto Walker(2000,36), thisportrait
panel is one of only two known to her that certainlypostdate
the earlyor middle third century.
6' Parlasca 2000.
'4Amsterdam,AllardPiersonMuseum723, in Parlascaand
Seemann 1999, 335 (no. 229). The redating establishedby
Smith (1997) on firmpaleographicand onomasticevidenceis
ca. 50 B.C.-A.D.50. This is a conservativedate range,and the
Demotic papyriused for paleographiccomparisonwith the
coffin group's inscriptionsfavorthe 50 B.C.,or an even earli-
er, date; cf. Hoffmann 1995, 38-9.
95
Roman cemeteries yet discovered in Egypt, where
he found several dozen mummies bearing natural-
istic portraits or cartonnage masks with hairstyles
modeled on those of the rulingJulio-Claudian fam-
ily (fig. 6). Hampered by the speed with which the
excavation was conducted, and the large area it cov-
ered, Petrie's records are imperfect but nonethe-
less reveal the general layout and character of the
interments.66 During the mid first century A.D.,
burial customs at Hawara accommodated both two-
and three-dimensional artistic treatments for the
head of the deceased, with varying degrees of natu-
ralism.67 Masked and portrait mummies could be
deposited in a single grave, and the shrouds that
wrap the lower bodies of some mummies, in combi-
nation with either a portrait or a mask, are very sim-
ilar to each other in construction and decoration.
What these interrelationships demonstrate is that
the Hawara cemetery does not simply present evi-
dence for the concurrent use of masked and por-
trait mummies. The intertwining of mask, portrait,
and shroud usage indicates that the mortuary
sphere in which these goods were produced was
small and that the same artisans or workshops con-
tributed to burials that modern scholarship has
tended to treat separately, imposing a distinction
that the ancient actors do not seem to have made.68
Mortuary practices operate on multiple levels of
meaning to mediate the communal and personal
experience of death and, in Egyptian thought, to
transform the dead for an eternal existence. Be-
cause funerary art is an active component of these
practices, the agency through which it was created
and employed should be a central consideration
in any interpretive effort. This is all the more true
when funerary art includes a prominent pictorial
representation of the deceased. Creating an image
of this sort necessitated the selection of appropri-
ate visual cues and provided an opportunity, per-
haps otherwise rare, to communicate the subject's
self-identity and whatever considerations influ-
enced the construction of that identity. The funer-
65
Perhapsthe basis on which the male masksmentioned
above in n. 47 were dated?
66Roberts(1997) comparesPetrie'sexcavationrecordswith
his publishedreports.
67Amask that inserts a painting where the sculpted face
wouldbe expected underscoresthispoint:ManchesterMuse-
um 1767,illustratedin Borg 1998, 73.
"6Thusthe standardreferenceworks(Parlasca1966;Grimm
1974) focus on either the Hawarashroudsand panel portraits
(Parlasca)or the masks(Grimm).Similarly,Walkerand Bier-
brier 1997aseparates"Portraitsand mummiesfrom Hawara"
(at 37-76) and "Gildedmasksfrom Hawara"(at 77-85).
96 CHRISTINA RIGGS
ary art from Hawara illustrates this point. Given that
masks and painted portraits were both viable op-
tions for representing the dead at Hawara in the
first century A.D., it was presumably patron choice
that governed their use, with or without a shroud.
Factors contributing to this decision might include
some element of personal preference, or "taste," or
some quality of the dead individual which we are
not always unable to discern from the information
available to us, such as his or her membership in a
familial, professional, religious, or other social
group, or the cause of the person's death. The costs
of various options, and how much a purchaser was
willing to spend on funereal outlay, are also likely
to have been considerations, although there is min-
imal evidence for the pricing of funerary equip-
ment, and the expense of a burial assemblage need
not have been directly related to the socioeconom-
ic status of that individual. In the absence of thor-
ough archaeological documentation for most of the
Ptolemaic and Roman cemeteries in Egypt, it is dif-
ficult to establish what a "typical" burial assemblage
was and how funerary art, in its original context,
related to other mortuary factors, such as spatial
distribution, body treatment (where mummies have
not survived), and the deposition of any other grave
goods.69
The age and sex of the deceased do not seem to
have been decisive factors in choosing one type of
mummy adornment over another, since masks, por-
traits, and shrouds from Hawara were used for the
interments of males and females, adults and chil-
dren alike. At the same time, however, funerary art
of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods expressed an
evident concern for gender differentiation, main-
taining clear correspondences between the sex of
the deceased and any representation of him or her.
This apparent requirement extended to represen-
tations whose primary goal was not to provide a nat-
uralistic portrait of the deceased but to record his
or her assimilation to an Egyptian deity. Dead males
were identified with Osiris, dead females with
Hathor, an iconological interpretation supported
by funerary literature of the period and object in-
scriptions that prefix the name of the deceased with
"Osiris" or "Hathor" as appropriate. In the Theban
;9Petrie's (1911, 1) observationthat perhapstwo in 100 of
the mummiesat Hawarabore panel portraitsis vague at best.
On the fallaciesof directlyextrapolatingsocialstatusfromgrave
goods and other mortuarycharacteristics,see for instance
Morris1993, 103-8.
70Hathor had close and ancient ties to both Nut and Isis,
and the three can shareiconographictraits;thus the floors of
[AJA 106
necropolises of the late first and early second cen-
turies A.D., shrouds identical to those from the Soter
family burials employ a life-size image of Osiris for
males (fig. 3) and, for females, an image to be un-
derstood as Hathor or as the deceased in the guise
of Hathor.70 These shrouds represent the dead not
by replicating what a person looked like, or indeed
any individual characteristics, but by linking the
deceased to his or her divine counterpart.
To return to the question of agency, funerary art
presented options not only in regard to what type
of object or monument would be used but also in
relation to what pictorial representations the ob-
ject or monument would incorporate. The con-
scious and deliberate character of such represen-
tational choices is nowhere more evident than in
works of funerary art that combine visual elements
from the Egyptian and Greek or Roman reper-
toires-such as a naturalistic portrait on an actual
or represented mummy, or contrasting figures mak-
ing offerings to a tomb owner (fig. 4). A 1961 arti-
cle by the Hungarian Egyptologist Laszl6 Castigli-
one addressed this phenomenon, which he termed
a "dualite du style," and noted its particular preva-
lence in funerary art of the Roman period, specifi-
cally in the depiction of the deceased. Castiglione's
choice of words, however, obscured his argument;
the word "style" is notoriously difficult to define
and cannot support the weight of meaning with
which scholars have tried to imbue it in this in-
stance.
The examples Castiglione collected, like the
examples presented here, do not combine differ-
ent styles: they employ two discrete systemsof represen-
tation, the Egyptian and the Hellenic. From its ear-
liest inception, the Egyptian representational sys-
tem relied on a standard conceptualization of the
human form and used bordered areas to assert or-
der in compositions; both traits are especially evi-
dent in two-dimensional art. By contrast, the Hel-
lenic system, descending from the Classical Greek
tradition, sought to render the observable world
more nearly as the viewer sees it. The two systems
are pictorial languages, each with its own grammar
and vocabulary. Societies and their arts do not exist
in a vacuum: just as a person can learn another spo-
Soter-groupcoffinsemployan essentiallyidenticalfemalerep-
resentationwherea depictionof Nutwouldbe expected.Some
coffins depict a nw-pothieroglyphover this figure's head to
identifyher asNut:HorakandHarrauer1999,11 (Edinburgh,
RoyalMuseum of Scotland 1956.357A);Schmidt 1919, 231,
fig. 1329 (Louvre E 13016). For the Soter family, see Van
Landuyt1995.
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT
ken language, so artists and viewers alike can ac-
quire additional artistic languages with adequate
exposure and incentive. Thus Roman art devel-
oped an idiom that drew on the art of Classical and
Hellenistic Greece, exploiting athletic body types
and ideal faces, for example, to convey divinity and
youth.71
In the funerary art of Ptolemaic and Roman
Egypt, the combination of the Hellenic and Egyp-
tian representational systems is often quite strik-
ing because the systems contrast so emphatically
and could be integrated in diverse ways. Two tombs
in Alexandria, studied by Guimier-Sorbets and Seif
el-Din (see n. 8), each juxtapose the two artistic
systems by depicting the abduction of Persephone
in one register, in Hellenic form, while the register
immediately above shows Anubis tending a mum-
my on a bier, in keeping with traditional Egyptian
form. In most dual-system objects or monuments, a
figure of the deceased following Hellenic repre-
sentational norms fills a prominent position. For
example, the "arm-sling" pose was a popular male
portrait type in the Greek East from the third cen-
tury B.C. onward: the subject supported his weight
on his left leg and wrapped a Greek mantle deco-
rously around his body so that his right arm, clasped
to his chest, held the draped garment in place. This
is the posture that dominates one wall of the Da-
khleh Oasis tomb of Petosiris (fig. 4), as opposed
to the other walls' register-ordered Egyptian
scenes.72 The arm-sling portrait type was also adopt-
ed for a coffin lid whose base bears a traditionally
formed ba-bird, and for the trilingual stela of Besas,
who is flanked by protective mummiform figures in
Egyptian profile view (fig. 7).73 Poses from the rep-
ertoire of Greek and Roman funerary composi-
tions-the deceased on a dining couch, or in the
act of burning incense-appear in combination
with Egyptian elements as well.74 Nor are Hellenic-
based images limited to representations of the de-
ceased: witness the offering figure nearer Petosiris
in figure 4, or the depiction of Osiris on a group of
shrouds or wall-hangings from Saqqara.75 Similarly,
71H6lscher 1987, 15, 34, 57-8; Smith 1996.
72Whitehouse1998,withdiscussionand furtherreferences.
73Coffin:BritishMuseumEA55022,in Walkerand Bierbri-
er 1997a,36 (no. 10); cf. Berlin,AgyptischesMuseum17016,
from Abusirel-Meleq,in Parlascaand Seemann 1999, 212-3
(no. 120). Stela of Besas:supra,n. 12.
74Recliningon couch:TerenouthisstelaesuchasHannover,
KestnerMuseum1925.225,in Parlascaand Seemann1999,252
(no. 156). Burningincense:Abdalla1992, 103-4.
75Including Moscow,PushkinMuseumI la 5747 and Ber-
lin, AgyptischesMuseum11651:Parlascaand Seemann 1999,
97
the Egyptian representational system could accom-
modate subject matter that was Hellenic in origin,
as in a cartonnage fragment depicting a man wear-
ing a Greek tunic and mantle yet drawn according
to Egyptian conventions.76
Content and artistic form do not always corre-
spond predictably, but in general, established Egyp-
tian artistic forms relay traditional Egyptian religious
iconography. Some scenes and symbols-Anubis
embalming a mummy, the weighing of the heart-
seem intrinsically related to the manner of their
pictorial presentation. Egyptian iconography pre-
serves the key elements of the funerary cycle
through which the deceased, like Osiris and the
sun god, would overcome death, repel any dangers,
and be eternally rejuvenated in the afterlife. Like
the native temples, which were still being decorat-
ed into the mid third century A.D., the Egyptian
funerary tradition provided a functional prerequi-
site for preserving and passing down Egyptian art.
And although Egyptian art appears entirely typical
to a modern Egyptologist, to a viewer in Ptolemaic
and Roman Egypt its distinctive conventions were
not the sole or even the primary visual idiom, and
at some point the conventions themselves must have
come to signify a delimited religious sphere.
The dissemination of artistic forms through
building projects, coinage, publicly displayed ob-
jects (whether a statue or a shop sign), and ephem-
eral media now lost, all made the Hellenic visual
language a familiar part of lived experience. Some
scholars have gone to great lengths to posit a na-
tive Egyptian origin for a range of artistic develop-
ments, imagining that the country's populace val-
ued and wished to perpetuate its pharaonic heri-
tage in much the same way as modern scholars
do.77 Such formulations can be as inaccurate and
patronizing as the earlier pejorative views they seek
to replace.78 The adoption of Hellenic art was an
ongoing process and an inevitable development,
particularly in an eastern Mediterranean society
that privileged naturalistic portraiture as a means
of self-presentation.
246 (no. 153) and 260-1 (no. 165), respectively.
76LouvreE 25384:Aubertand Cortopassi1998,82 (no. 38);
also publishedby du Bourguet (1957) and illustratedin Cas-
tiglione (1961, 212).
77For example, the language of struggleand competition
thatBianchiusesto characterize"theultimatetriumphof Clas-
sicaloverEgyptianart"(Bianchietal. 1988,80), or Corcoran's
assertionthat"tworivalcultures"existed (Corcoran1995,2).
78Such as McCrimmon 1945, 61: "The Graeco-Egyptian
mummy ... is a spectacleof ugliness,mediocrity,and incon-
gruity."
98 CHRISTINA RIGGS
The intimate connection between self-presenta-
tion and the need to create a lasting image of the
deceased is a hallmark of the funerary art produced
in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, and the question
of who used such art is vital to any interpretation of
it. As Borg has demonstrated, the mummy portraits
display markers of Greek identity, which formed a
sharp contrast to Roman identity from the late Hel-
lenistic period into the mid second century A.D.79
Features of the portraits, such as tunics, mantles,
and beards, would have been read in keeping with
the societal predilection for cultivating Greek lan-
guage, education, and values. This holds true for
other naturalistic representations of the dead as
well, whether on coffins, stelae, tombs, or statuary.
The fact that Greek identity could be framed with-
in the traditional sphere of Egyptian mortuary prac-
tices indicates the extent to which Greek-ness was
a desirable model for the self. At the same time, the
portraits and other forms of funerary art often point
to the deceased's engagement with Egyptian cults
by means of iconography that seems to reveal more
than a divine assimilation. Studded stoles and flo-
ral bandoliers can mark priestly office, for exam-
ple, and the depiction of women in a knotted man-
tle and corkscrew curls, as worn by Isis in Roman
cult statues, recorded their cult affiliation.80 Simi-
larly, the star-emblem diadem and contabulated
mantle seem to mark priests of Sarapis.81 Using
Egyptian mortuary practices, and accompanying
them with highly decorated funerary art, may itself
signal that the people thus memorialized were par-
ticularly involved with native cults and temples. The
elaboration of Egyptian iconography and Demotic
or hieroglyphic texts on numerous objects suggests
that patrons and artists had recourse to specialist
knowledge of the kind that the religious infrastruc-
ture preserved and passed down. In short, the spe-
cific manner in which Egyptian and Hellenic art
interacted as a means of funerary commemoration
can be seen not simply as a passive reception of
dominant (Greek and Roman) visual forms but as
an active and considered response to the multiple
cultural factors that shaped selfhood in that time
and place.
79Borg 1996, 150-76; Borg 1998, 34-59.
0On stoles and bandoliers,see Whitehouse 1998, 261; cf.
Rosenbaum 1960, 134 (appendix II, no. 1), pl. 134. For the
Isiacaffiliationsof women and girls,in Egyptand elsewhere,
see Thompson 1981; Eingartner 1991; Walters 1988. The
mantle costume associatedwith Isis ultimatelyderivesfrom
Egyptiansources;one explicationof this is offered in Bianchi
1980.
[AJA 106
What funerary art of any form or content does not
automatically indicate is the social rank and eco-
nomic means of the deceased, despite a common
assumption that the more numerous and more in-
trinsically valuable funerary goods are, the wealthi-
er and more important the dead person must have
been in life. Although mummification rites, a cof-
fin or stela, and space in a tomb represent a signif-
icant financial outlay, it is difficult to gauge how
people prioritized such expenditures. Art is chief-
ly endowed with status by the contexts in which it is
owned and used within a society. A costly burial,
perhaps with a gilded coffin or the best-quality
mummification available, might well have been the
prerogative of a local elite of some means, but in
the larger picture of Roman Egyptian social struc-
tures, the emphasis should lie on local, rather than
elite. There is no evidence that any of the officials
who administered Egypt, or any holders of Roman
or Alexandrian citizenship, were buried with the
varieties of funerary art that typify the corpus, for
example, a panel, shroud, mask, coffin, or tomb with
Egyptian features. Entrance to certain social orders,
like the gymnasium and metropolitan citizenship,
was tightly controlled, and again no firm links can
be made between members of these privileged ur-
ban classes and the extant funerary material.82 Al-
though such links might well have existed, in the
absence of supporting evidence, it is a fallacy to
allege that the bulk, and "best," of the funerary art
from Roman Egypt must have been used by the high-
est-ranking, and "best," people of the community,
region, or country. That said, the costs implicit in
the combination of mummification, interment, and
funerary art point to a level of affluence among the
patrons. Further, decorated burials tend to occur
in cemeteries associated with urbanized areas,
where a wealthier, more "hellenized" population
existed alongside the skilled craft industries that
such burials required.
More than anything, the variety of the forms, ma-
terials, and representational styles observed in this
funerary art, along with its physical and chronolog-
ical spread, suggests that no blanket explanation
as to the social status of its owners can be sufficient.
81Goette 1989.Borg (1996, 164) correctshis identification
of the contabulatedgarment,which is a mantle ratherthan a
toga.
82AlthoughWalker(1997) arguesthatthe subjectsof mum-
myportraitsmayhavebeen metropolitanelites and members
of the gymnasium.Papyrologicalevidencefor attainingmem-
bershipin these groupsis collected in Nelson 1979.
2002] FUNERARY ART OF PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT
Some funerary assemblages have a conservative, non-
Hellenic character, such as the Soter group of cof-
fins, shrouds, and papyri from second-century A.D.
Thebes (e.g., fig. 3).83 One little-explored consid-
eration is that such material purposely employed
native iconography to craft an alternative to the pre-
vailing social structure and its visual norms. In the
Soter group, Egyptian texts and representations
dominate, with archaizing formulations in the lan-
guage, the coffin shapes, and the large-scale fig-
ures of the deceased. Similarly, the names and (rare-
ly) titles of the three-dozen individuals associated
with the group suggest families of predominantly
Egyptian descent and with local concerns; one cof-
fin-owner held Egyptian priesthoods at nearby Cop-
tos.84 If the design and deployment of the Soter
material was intended as an expression of Egyptian
identity and Egyptian values, in contrast to Hellen-
ic ones, it is probably not an isolated case among
contemporaneous funerary art. At the very least, the
celebration of native mortuary rites and the tradi-
tional decoration of burials provided a safe and
specific setting in which Egyptian-ness could be
emphasized by those who wished to do so.
CONCLUSION
The popular appeal of exhibitions like "Ancient
Faces" and the scholarly achievement of the many
recent catalogues and publications concerned with
Ptolemaic and Roman funerary art have accentuat-
ed the interpretive potential of a large and varied
corpus of material. Fascination with this art is such
that the response at the close of the 20th century
has been as enthusiastic as the initial reception
these works, and the mummy portraits in particu-
lar, received at the end of the 19th century. It is
useful, however, to consider the full spectrum of
funerary art and related mortuary evidence with-
out unduly privileging one type of object or docu-
mentation. The range and quantity of the material
is extraordinary, and for much of it, multiple sourc-
es of information-archaeological,
visual, textual,
even physiological-can coalesce in a way that is
not often possible in scholarship on the ancient
world.
This corpus of funerary art offers us an unparal-
leled opportunity to see the inhabitants of Ptole-
maic and Roman Egypt as they presented them-
selves and wished to be seen within the parameters
83Cf.Van
Landuyt1995;although attributableto the same
workshop,not allmaterialfromthisgroupbelongsto the Soter
family,which is the focus of Van Landuyt'sstudy.
99
of mortuary commemoration. In this way, reading
representations of the deceased, regardless of
whether those representations are naturalistic por-
traits, can provide a window into the self-identity of
the individuals portrayed. Funerary art may well
have been the most opportune, if not the only, ven-
ue in which some people could both record and
negotiate various aspects of identity: class, sex, pro-
fession, religion, family, and cultural ties. In doing
so, they drew on the artistic and religious traditions
then available, and the resultant visual imagery
dovetails their aspirations for this life and the next.
The interplay of Roman, Greek, and Egyptian cul-
tures was a dynamic process, and it is more useful
to look for the variety of ways in which this process
manifested itself than to characterize it as either a
jumbled mixture or a combative divide. As visual
evidence indicates--especially that which can be
characterized as dual-system-the actors were aware
of the multiple cultural derivations that contribut-
ed to their contemporary existence. Recent re-
search in this field demonstrates how far forward
scholarship on the funerary art of Hellenistic and
Roman Egypt has moved and also how much re-
mains to be done if the material is to be used to full
advantage in the study of this multifaceted society.
THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
OXFORD OX 1 4AW
UNITED KINGDOM
CHRISTINA.RIGGS@QUEENS.OX.AC.UK
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